Love Yourself

This is a cliche idea for a post, but I think it should be said anyway. 
This Valentine's day, whether you have a honey or not, love yourself! Treat yourself to a day of eating right. Don't binge on the restaurant food. Don't throw up after eating a helping of icecream or a cupcake. Exercise by taking a stroll with your loved one or by yourself to look at the canopy of stars. Buy yourself flowers or stop to smell some that you come across and pretend they were planted just for you. 
Valentine's Day is another bulimic's nightmare. It's a holiday that revolves around (and let's be real here) chocolate. People give out lots of candy, and you're expected to go overboard a little bit. 
So here are some ideas about how to make this Valentine's Day an actual valentine instead of:

1. Do not go out to dinner.

Take your beloved on a different date. Go to a museum. Watch a movie. Go to a sports game. The zoo. Go swimming. The botannical garden. Bowling. Laser tag. You don't need to give yourself a reason to binge. 

2. Spend the day writing and delivering anonymous valentines to people you know. 

3. Write a valentine to yourself and post it on the mirror.

4. Call a friend who doesn't have a date and invite them to come over to do something. Or talk about how you feel about not having a date.

5. Buy yourself a flower. Or buy your crush a flower and give it to him. 

6. Build a snowheart!

7. If someone offers you chocolate, take it and then give it to someone else later.

8. Or if someone offers you chocolate, say thank you but you'd prefer a hug instead.

Any other ideas?

What are you guys doing for Valentine's Day?

ED Story Comments

I wrote a story about a girl with bulimia for my fiction class. The story was written out of my fear that EDs are incurable. The main character Anna (catch my word play with that? Her therapist is Dr. Miano, which I think is a good one too. No one noticed, of course.) is a recovered bulimic who has gone on to live a relatively normal life. One day she sees her therapist again and this causes her facade to unravel until she's right back where she was before she left the treatment center. 

I was so nervous about turning it in! What if people didn't like it? What if they guessed that I was bulimic because of the story? 

But no one did, not even my friend who I told I had had an ED. 

And people didn't seem to think the story was that bad. 

One comment that I found interesting was that my teacher said she had read lots of stories about bulimia or anorexia. I was surprised, mostly because I didn't think there were so many girls with EDs. Of course, healthy people could certainly write about them, but I just didn't think there was that much in the literature. 

What this experience has taught me is that I really am not alone in my struggle. Surely some of those other people have dealt with EDs just as I have, which is why they chose to write about them. 

It also reminds me of the INVISIBLITY CLAUSE: if you don't tell people directly, they will not realize you have bulimia.

Now. What should my next story be about?

You Look Skinny

It happened yesterday. I was sitting down after running and my suitemate came up to me and started chatting. "You look thinner," she said. 
I do? I look thinner? I've only lost 4 pounds in the past month and most of that was binge weight anyway. 
When she said this to me my first reaction wasn't joy. Instead it was this mix of queasiness and guilt that formed a ball in the pit of my stomach. I don't believe I look thinner- in fact, I believe my stomach sticks out even more than it used to. So I felt guilty for somehow "tricking" her into thinking I'm skinnier. It's like I was tricking her into believing I'm a better person than I am. The queasiness came from surprise, probably. 
But I did not feel good. 
I don't think this has ever happened to me before. I wasn't called skinny until I lost a lot of weight, like 15 pounds, last time. And by that time I felt that I deserved it, even though I wanted to be even more skinny. Actually, I don't think I've ever been called skinny by someone who didn't have a bias towards me. 
My family calls me thin sometimes, and back when I was restricting and overexercising they said it more than usual. My old boss said I was "too skinny" in a joking way- that I needed to eat meatballs to get more muscle. I didn't count him because he was just kidding. None of my friends called me skinny. None of them noticed that I had lost a lot of weight, probably because I made new friends after losing the weight. 
My reaction does not bode well. It's making me want to lose more weight so that I can truly be skinnier and that way I won't be lying to my suitemate. I should feel good that people think I'm skinny. 

How do you react when someone notices you've lost weight?  

Goals of the Week 30

My b/p goal for last week was to not eat dessert. That failed miserably. I kept eating more desserts and I couldn't stop even if I wanted to. I thought it might even be because I had the word "dessert" in my goal, so this week I'm going to try a positive statement instead of a negative one. My goal is to eat all my intake before 9 PM. Which technically means no food after 9, but I'm trying to keep the goal something I will do instead of something I won't do. 
My goal last week was to not weigh myself. I can say I did alright. I weighed myself about 5 times over the course of the week, but not every day, which is still lower than previously. My new goal is to not spend money on the vending machine food. To prevent myself from spending money on vending machine food. Last week I ran through about 10 dollars in one binge. I don't want to run out because I end up spending tons of my own money and that would be awful. How would I explain to my family that I need more than $200 for food when I have a meal plan?
What are your goals?

Eatopia and Spelling

Another busy week is starting for me. I decided to drop one of my classes because it causes me too much stress to devote the time. I'm doing ok behavior-wise- there were two days with binges and purges and yesterday I binged again in the evening but today's been good so far. 
I wanted to share a site that Anonymous mentioned on the previous post. 

http://www.youreatopia.com/

I clicked on the links to the posts she recommended and found that this is a great blog. It's inspiring, helpful, and engaging. I fully recommend it and I'll probably spend a few hours reading some of it later once I'm done with homework. 

Here are the two posts in particular: 
http://www.youreatopia.com/blog/2012/5/22/extreme-hunger-what-is-it.html

http://www.youreatopia.com/blog/2011/9/14/why-is-bingeing-not-bingeing-when-you-are-recovering-from-re.html


On a completely different note, why is it "bingeing" and not "binging"? 
I've never understood it, and in case you didn't notice, I shun the correct spelling and just use the one without the e. "bingeing" just makes me want to say ew because grammatical rules state that verbs drop the e when becoming the "ing" form, so it looks weird. It's English, so of course it doesn't follow the rule, but I wish it did. 

The Truth about Recovery

When I first went into treatment, I thought that because I hadn’t had an ED for so long, and because I wasn’t binging and purging every single meal, that I would recover before the summer was out. I thought treatment would magically work and I would be in recovery without having to even try to keep behaviors at bay. Oh boy, was I wrong.

The truth is that recovery is work. Very hard, long work. You have to take baby steps to get anywhere and for every two steps forward you take one step back. Treatment won’t cure you if you don’t put in the effort. This is unfortunate, because people with EDs are usually ambivalent about recovery so they have an natural disinclination to put in the work.

What kind of work?

Well. First, you have to keep stock of what you eat, but not too obsessively, or it will lead to bad things. You just need to make sure you’re eating enough and not overeating. Then, you have to challenge yourself to slowly go out of your comfort zone by eating foods you don’t think are safe. You have to prevent yourself from eating 10 cookies even when you feel like you’re about to cry. And worse, when you’ve eaten 10 cookies, you have to prevent yourself from purging.

You have to make sure that you don’t exercise too much.

You have to practice the skills you learn in treatment. Every day. And every single time you have an urge.

You have to cope with things without throwing up or eating or starving yourself. You have to deal with people without a crutch.

You have to face your demons. You think you’re uninteresting without your illness? Let’s find out.

You will hate yourself at first. Eating more always always always makes you think you’re fat. For a bit. But then when your body begins to calm down and you realize you’re not eating enough to gain weight, it will be okay.

But all this work will pay off, right?

Not necessarily. Recovery homework never stops and it never lightens. It probably gets easier to longer and more you do it, but just because you go through the motions does not mean you’re recovered. For example, I am constantly working towards recovery, trying to set goals to get better and battling inner thoughts. It gets better sometimes, and then sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes I feel like all my effort is for nothing. I believe that in the end, once I’m fully recovered, it will be worth it, but in the moment, I just feel cheated.

The bottom line is that treatment will not make you better. It will give you skills that you can use to get yourself better, and it will give you support. But recovery is about you and if you don’t decide to do what it takes, you won’t get better.

I wish it were different. I don’t feel capable of doing it myself. I wish there could be a guardian angel standing on my shoulder telling me what to eat and what to avoid and that I shouldn’t purge my breakfast. Or someone to chain me up whenever I want to binge.

But there’s not, so I have to do it. And I can do it. And I will do it. Even if it takes the rest of my life. 

Goals of the Week 29

I promise I'll read all your blogs soon! I've been extremely busy but I'm going to try to read later today. 

My b/p goal was to follow my meal plan for at least 4 more days. And I can say I definitely did that. I had two slight binges on Saturday and Sunday, but no purging whatsoever! If I make it through this Wednesday, it will have been my first time ever with no purging for two weeks that wasn't supplemented by extreme binging. I have to say that not purging feels really good. Even on the days that I binged, I had no desire to purge. I can sing again! I feel better about life, and ready to tackle all the busywork (and horrible math) my classes require. 

My goal for this week is to not eat dessert on a single day. Not a single bite on a single meal. Allowing myself to have dessert just leads to more and more of it going into my stomach as the week progresses, so I'm going to try to take a break from it. 

My non b/p goal was to have 3 positive interactions with people, even if I didn't know them very well. I can say I did that, but I didn't really have to try this week. So I'm going to keep up with that and make sure I get those interactions in no matter what. This week my non b/p goal will be to not weigh myself. I did horribly with that last week, so I need to try harder. 

What are your goals?